But It Can Be Won
by Silvia Kundera
Summary: In which Elena doesn't know what she wants... until she gets it. Elena with Stefan AND Damon. Leave no Salvatore behind! I hope to start a trend.


Title: But It Can Be Won  
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries  
Disclaimer: I do not own The Vampire Diaries or its characters.  
Pairing: Elena with both Stefan & Damon  
Rating: Mature  
Words: 1,240 words  
Summary: In which Elena doesn't know what she wants... until she gets it.

~8~

The first time Elena Gilbert thinks she fell in love was a wince-bright sunny day. The memory is vivid, stained glass clear:

The grass smells freshly cut and the necklace he fastened is warm from the sun (but she'd thought it was his palms, so large when they'd settled on her shoulders). It singes the front of her throat as she smiles at him. He is so mysterious and new, and she likes that, likes the impossibly perfect way his mouth fits over hers. He said he wanted her to have this.

It's nothing like Matt and his sandbox, stole-your-toys grin. It's like running away from home, convertible top down, the wind in your hair.

He thanks her for pushing him; she'd always wanted to push somebody.

_oh, this is it_, she hums in her head. _this is what I've been waiting for._

~8~

She's wrong.

~8~

The first time Elena falls (truly, fiercely, blood-poundingly), there's dirt and dribbles of ash on her jeans. She has her arms around his brother and she can feel the weight of his eyes. She thinks nothing could ever touch them in this instant, her and Damon, and she tightens her arms, scuttles minutely forward. She believes, for a warm pinch of seconds, that she can hold off the world with her claw-curled fingers. She can hold up the sky and blanket it over them. She can come through for Damon enough to staunch the wounds the woman with her face left behind.

And Elena, she loves this man, Stefan, for wanting her to.

~8~

She loves his echoing house, peppered with books, and bells, and broken gadgets. It feels like a hundred homes, rolled into one. Elena leans against his chest and breathes in cotton and memories. She is calmed and infuriated, in this complicated, alien life with him. She will never have him as just himself, without the bindings and baggage.

And they tie her to him, too, tighter than she knew how to be once upon a time. She'd decided to take this, take everything that came with him, before she knew what that meant. And then it was too late to stop.

She loves his thick, yielding bed now--even with stains of pigeon and rabbit. He'll lie with her there, for ages, pulling sheets above their heads and listening to her heart beat, his feet shift, Damon rustling and bustling in the next room. It's something animal-warm and _safe_, these sounds. Like knowing you're alive.

Stefan will hear the footsteps first-- she feels the displacement of air, her chest tighten and ease. His brother will offer coffee, calico kittens, a limerick. He flattens the wrong areas of the mattress to make them scowl.

He was there before they arrived (always)-- this subtle lingering scent of Damon-sleep and hair products (favorite scotch, blended colognes, old peeling ink). It's mixed into the pillows. They catch him spreading newspaper and clashing jackets over the covers. Checking their messages. Answering their phones. Leaving post-it notes.

They make new scents and new sounds, as Stefan bites (soft, so soft, never teeth) at the underside of her chin as he enters her. He stabs gasps out from her lungs and it's wonderful, whispering and giggling and squirming around him, bucking up against him. It feels like they're immortal, like this can never end.

~8~

The second time she falls:

In a darkened classroom, Damon's voice is cracking. Rain splatters against the windows.

There are weapons strewn across a writing desk, metal gleaming through the shadows. Elena is not thinking of what could be left to rescue--unfathomable. Her heart feels bruised from rattling against her ribcage. She feels like some part of him, that wild tiger, dive-bombing crow slice of Damon. She wants to _do_ something, say her peace with blood and vengeance.

She is still not a fraction of what has been cracked open under his words.

_we're breaking his heart_, she thinks. _oh, stefan. you don't even know. we're breaking his fucking heart._

~8~

She leans her head on Damon's shoulder as they wait outside an iron door. She rests her feet on his thighs. She doesn't know what she tries to tell him. Except:

(don't leave oh god oh, stefan. stefan.)

She think maybe he says it back to her.

~8~

She thinks Stefan's broken almost every piece of him (accidentally, purposely, inevitably) and they want her to put him back together.

They lie about this. Both of them.

They lie _a lot_, these brothers, and only sometimes to themselves, and she loves them anyway.

~8~

She loves polishing her homework in their living room. The couch is wide and long, battered soft by hundreds of foot soles and restless sleepers, punctuated with pens. It smells like ancient dust and lazy intellectual work. There's a perfect prop for her book along its back. Elena lies there, turning her pages.

She slips off her sneakers and Damon pinches her toes for attention. He comes to tell her stories that leave her appalled and outrageously fascinated. He has danced with princes and buried bodies across four continents. She lets her hair drift onto his shoulder and he plays with it, fiddling with the ends and smoothing it back behind her ear, as he weaves a tale of high speed horseback chases. She can imagine, now: vultures and blossoming cherry trees, big-tent carnivals and gin joints, a wet English morning, doomed protest marches in dozens of languages and countries.

She has found a stronger love for humanity, through him, than she ever thought possible. The kind of depth, she thinks, you can only find in distance--that you can only ever reach for something you've irrevocably lost.

~8~

The fifth time she kisses Damon it's mid-conversation. She has on drawstring pants and he tugs at their laces. He was making some point that was so true she hated him. He asks for nothing and he's lying and she has to touch him.

She has Stefan's fingers between hers when she does it.

She has Stefan's strength at her back, and he lets her hands go so she can cup his brother's face. She can feel it change as Damon presses up close against her, shifting under her fingers, and something twists in Elena that leaves her shaking, hot and aching to be split.

The flesh where Stefan punched him (the second time she did this) is whole and still so beautiful. Elena kisses him there as well, and Damon slices through space to press her back along the kitchen wall. He runs hands down her arms and she arches into it. She can hear the clink of glass and splashing liquid as Stefan pours himself a drink; can somehow hear his wry bemusement. Damon's eyelids are like silk against her stomach.

_we will always come for you_, she whispers. _you are so goddamned stupid_

~8~

Katherine has poisoned enough, _taken_ enough. Katherine can't have this too, this love of hers.

This doesn't feel like history repeating. It feels so big, so wide, that the world couldn't possibly have been ready for it before now. It feels like she's breaking rules Katherine has never heard of--that she couldn't, in a dozen lifetimes, understand. It feels unstoppable.

It's hard enough to be a home. A weight Elena was built to carry, that she's earned.


End file.
